Total situational awareness since 2004.

January 31, 2010

This is definitely a must-read, and a nice bit of validation for having a non-theatre arts-policy wonk on board for the group read-thru. Check out Ian David Moss' take here. He strips down Outrageous Fortune to some of its core conflicts, and shows how basically the mess we're in is a pretty clear result of market forces at work.

He ends up the same place I am at right now: The way to reform the new play landscape is to reform the funding landscape. We'll have more on that later, but in the meantime, seriously, RTWT.

UPDATE: Scott's comment makes it clear that what I meant by "reform the funding landscape" is totally vague, so let me just expand on that point for a second... There are two ways forward, as far as I can tell, for changing the New Play Landscape. The first one is what I'll call the Buckminster Fuller route, which is to say Create Something New. Scott's CRADLE Arts, Gus' Homing Project, 99 and other joining the self-producing bandwagon, 13P... these are all examples (big and small) of that. This fits into Mead Hunter's take that the only way to win is not to play. Obviously I agree with and am supportive of that. I think for most individual artists, this is the thing that makes sense. So the revolutionary side of me is satisfied with that.

But as I said before, there's a reformist side to me as well. And that side notices how many of the issues with New Play Development come down to incentives created by the funding community. And so, it seems that an enormous amount of good could be done by reforming those incentives. Scott thought I simply meant "more money" and while I am an advocate for more money (for reasons that should be obvious) what I was actually talking about here was reforming grant guidelines and funder priorities. The emphasis on World Premieres, for example, has been particularly toxic. It's also particularly illustrative... Notice in the book (which I don't have with me in DC so this is from memory) that they quote artistic directors who say that they see no evidence that calling something a World Premiere increases audience attendance. So who are they trying to please by calling shows-- including ones that aren't-- Premieres? Simple, funders, who often define New Play quite strictly.

Ian outlines some other areas where funders have shaped the New Play Landscape... another example is that, by relying on long-term financial viability as a major deciding factor, grant givers end up funding the very theaters that do new play development (and production) poorly... but the theme runs throughout the book. There is some evidence that the funding community is more flexible and open to a broader conversation than the current generation of artistic directors (ex: the NEA gave Scott money to start CRADLE!). So I see an opportunity to do some good there.

The current American Theatre System was created by grant money and grant guidelines. It has been shaped by grant money and guidelines. It will continue to be. To ignore the funding part of the puzzle is to ignore half of the story. That's all I'm saying. We can do both the Buckminster Fuller route and the Funding Route at the same time.

UPDATE: This post is actually way more unfair than it should be, now that i've thought about it for a couple of hours (That'll learn me to blog during a via-TIVO viewing of a Grand Slam final). I want to write more about Isherwood's piece, hopefully tomorrow.... there's some really interesting stuff in there, and it's actually the kind of weekend critic's notebooks we should be seeing, but there's some problems with it as well that deserve unpacking.

January 29, 2010

I think we can just start calling this the HTFA Phenomenon which is, essentially, when theaters announce big new building projects that end up destroying them either artistically, spiritually or practically.

Stephen Eich, the executive director hired last June to run the theater, said 37 employees learned at a staff meeting Thursday that they would be out of work. The playhouse is essentially out of cash to continue running, he said, and faces more than $500,000 in immediate bills, plus more than $1.5 million owed on bank loans and other debts that have dogged the nonprofit company since the mid-1990s.

Founded in 1917, the Playhouse was designated in 1937 as the state theater of California.

Eich said that tapping into about $6 million donated for a capital campaign to refurbish the playhouse was not an option. "It just would not be any way for us to solve the problems of the place. Those monies are restricted for the building."

Wait.... so they decided to build a new building when they were already carrying over a decade old debts? And they can't fix it because the millions of dollars they've raised have to go to the new building? You've got to be fucking kidding me. Who let this happen?

It only gets worse as you keep reading... they were banking on a Naming Rights Donor to cough up $5 Million Dollars. Ugh. RTWT here.

January 28, 2010

This is going to perhaps be the lamest post I've ever written, but I'll just come out and admit that I never connected to him as a writer. We read Catcher in the Rye in school during the Holdenishist time in my life and it still didn't really do much for me. To this day, this has mystified me. I should've loved it. It should've "changed my life" and what not. But it didn't. I liked it alright, but vastly preferred Paul Auster's New York Trilogy which I was neglecting my homework to read (and, if I want to be totally honest, Equus, which seemed totally awesome to me at the time). I'm not defending this, or trying to harsh on anyone who really loved Salinger's writing and work. I'm just saying at these Big Cultural Watershed moments, I'm just reminded of how outside of the whole Catcher phenomenon I've always felt.

So let me ask you... what was your experience of reading Catcher in the Rye like? And what books changed your life in early adolescence?

Over the weekend, I saw Crazy Heart with my parents. I'm having trouble, frankly, formulating a blog post about it. Why? Because in order to discuss the movie, you need to give away its "third act", but the film is also so predictable that anyone who doesn't know what's going to happen within about fifteen minutes of the opening credits doesn't watch enough movies. In the same way that Avatar is, essentially, unspoilable, Crazy Heart is another iteration of a somewhat-satisfying formula.

That's okay, movies don't have to be surprising, and formulas persist because there's something delicious about them. We love watching, for example, the various members of a Crack Team of Something Or Other gradually come together and then try to pull of The Big One (that formula is so pleasing that it is not only Ocean's 11 and The Seven Samurai, but it's also the arc, repeated over and over again, of the first three seasons of The Wire). And so Crazy Heart delivers the tale of a Washed Up True Talent who Finds Himself Again with the Love Of A Good (Younger, Obvs) Woman.

Ah well, I'll give it a shot... you know the plot already, right? Jeff Bridges plays a washed up country and western legend who travels from bowling ally to bar in a beat-up car doing a tour, barely scraping by while drinking and smoking himself to death. And then along comes Maggie Gyllenhaal and her son from a previous relationship and he falls deeply in love with them both and starts to, you know, get his life together et cetera.

What makes the film good is, of course, the acting. Maggie Gyllenhaal delivers her best performance since Secretary and Jeff Bridges delivers another in a long, long line of brilliant, seemingly-effortless vanishing acts. If he ends up winning an Oscar for the role (as he almost certainly will) it will be one of the least-flashy performances to do it in a long time. Even Colin Farrell is good in it, and he's almost never good when he has to do an Americna accent.

The film and I part ways, however, as the redemptive final act of the film starts going underway. Not because I don't believe in redemption, or don't want it, it's just that the movie doesn't earn it. When Bridges' character finally decides to go sober after a multi-decade, life-destroying drinking habit destroys his nascent relationship with Gyllenhaal, the film spends about, oh, 2.5 minutes on the process of him sobering up. As he leaves the detox retreat he's enrolled in (via montage no less), Robert Duvall advises him that it might not take the first time, that he might relapse, that he needs to take it One Day at a Time. Bridges' response? "I think I've got it licked".

This line is so ridiculous in the face of the rather forthright portrayal of alcoholism that comes before it that the audience erupted in laughter when I saw the film. I half-expected the film to cut to him relapsing 24-48 hours later. Unfortunately, it didn't. Crazy Heart is so shockingly dishonest about how harrowing (and, I might add, brave) the journey to sobriety is, particularly after being an addict for over thirty years, that it totally lost me. After spending so much time with Bridges' journey to hit rock bottom, his redemptive climb back up out of the hole feels tacked on and cheap. The difference between a good formulaic film and an unsatisfying one turns out to be whether it invests its checklist of plot points with new meaning or simply runs down them. For most of Crazy Heart, its the former, and then in the last twenty minutes, it turns into the latter.

the State of the Union only comes once a year. And it's hard to imagine voters buying Obama's narrative of progress and achievement unless they see, well, some progress and some achievements. Obama made a strong statement in favor of health-care reform, but he didn't call on the House to pass the Senate bill, or the Senate to pass modifications, or for any alternative path to be followed. Success here will be measured not in reactions to the speech, but in the outcome of the effort. So too with the section on the economy, which sounded convincing, but will matter a lot less than the unemployment rate eight months from now.

I don’t blame/praise Obama for shit that is, Constitutionally speaking, the Congress’ job. The health care bill(s), the stimulus, etc. – I don’t know how much of his weight he’s thrown behind any of these, and neither do you, and I don’t have a Quantum Universe Simulator to calculate how much better everything would be if only he’d done x more than the unknown amount he’s done already on these things, and neither do you. You don’t even have an iPad. And the President can’t make recessions go away be wishing extra-hard, and he can’t be in every airport around the world looking out for losers who light their pants on fire. Maybe this is a bit simplistic. Maybe you’d be happier reading Einstein and Spinoza and Socrates’ super awesome an insightful group blog The Super Insightful Brainiac Foundation Report, but you can’t because they’re dead, likely due to my foolishness. But I’m alive, so you can have my opinion instead.

Even with several rhetorical concessions to conservatism, the president still hit the GOP, and hard. He emphasized, "We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions ... Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it’s not leadership." The president waved his hand at the skeletal agenda offered by Republicans: "The problem is, that’s what we did for eight years. That’s what helped lead us into this crisis. It’s what helped lead to these deficits. And we cannot do it again." He even nodded to the populist outrage over the bailouts that helped birth the Tea Parties, saying he "hated" the bailouts while describing why they were necessary.

However, the most important words the president had were for his own party. Facing the possibility that health-care reform might die on the operating table at the hands of panicked Democrats, the president remarked, "We still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve some problems, not run for the hills." It was doubtlessly a relief for Democrats to finally see that kind of leadership from the president, who has seemed absent as House Democrats have worked diligently to work out a deal even as their colleagues in the Senate have wrung their hands at the prospect of making changes to the bill through reconciliation.

January 27, 2010

I thought it was a good speech. Obviously, there's a lot in there I agree with, and some I don't. I was more frustrated by the stuff (particularly around health care reform) that was all vague platitudes. I worry Congress needed to hear Obama say "The House must pass the Senate Bill. The Senate must agree to improve the bill later. Let's get this done." Instead some vague "let's finish the job". This pragmatic search for wiggle room is often useful, but now is not one of those times.

Okay, folks... the good news is: there' s a reported emerging consensus that the House will be willing to pass the Senate bill if the Senate will fix it in reconciliation. There is also a reported emerging consensus that the Senate is leaning towards giving the House what it needs.

Simple, we're going to call the White House and urge them to publicly fight for Health Care Reform.

How are we going to do that? We are going to call 202-456-1414. And politely but passionately tell them to get the House and Senate To Pass The Damn Bill Now. While you're on the phone, tell them that Health Care Reform, not Ben Bernake's reappointment, should be their priority, and if they're willing to advocate straight majority rules for Bernake, it's good enough for HCR.

Go kick some ass people. We're closer than any previous attempt has ever gotten to making Health Care Reform a reality. Obama's polls are above Congress' polls, and Democrats are polling better than Republicans. One loss in Massachusetts should not be enough to tank this fucking thing. It's time for the White House to sack up and fight for something already.

One thing that comes up in Outrageous Fortune is subsidiary rights, the practice of producers taking a share of a playwrights royalty income off a specific play for some controlled amount of time (generally 5-10 years). The amount that producer's take changes, of course. The ceiling is currently 40% for a Broadway production.

This practice, it's worth noting, was actually pioneered by-- but not invented by-- everyone's hero Joe Papp. Papp's philosophy, as explained in Lewis Hyde's The Gift, was that playwrights given a production at The Public would, essentially, contribute a small amount of their earnings to ensure the next little guy had a shot. It was a way of passing resources from one generation to the next. Hyde thinks that this was a great idea, a brilliant practice. It is, in fact, one of the inspirations behind the Creative Capital Foundation's practices (they keep a small percentage of income that you make off the work of art created off of their grant, which then goes to help fund the next round of grantees so they don't have to do quite as much fundraising).

Philosophically speaking, I kind of like this idea. In its current implementation, of course, it really really doesn't work.

I have a feeling every commenter on this blog is going to say "we should just scrap it". But what if there were a way to fix it? What if, for example, the subsidiary rights didn't go to the theater itself but to some kind of new play foundation? Or to a new play fund at that specific theater?

August Schulenberg has some things to say about Outrageous Fortune that I have mixed feelings about, even though they are sentiments I myself have expressed in the past here on this blog. Here's his post.

I agree with him that it is not a zero-sum game. I also agree with him that we can still engage with institutions, and that that system does some amazing work. Heck, there's still a project or two that I'm pitching to larger theaters, because they're too expensive for me to do on my own within the indie theatre world. One of them involves twelve highly skilled musicians, and is thus hella expensive. I think there are a lot of great theaters within that system, even if I think the system is pretty fucked up.

I am not, by nature, a revolutionary. I don't want to burn anything down. I'm definitely more of a reformer in terms of outlook.

That being said, Gus outlines four really great things that we can urge the institutional theatre system to do, and that's where I start parting ways with his post, even as I agree with all four of them (and have advocated, as I said, for similar things in past posts).

Because here's the question: How precisely are we supposed to get theaters to do any of these things? What leverage, what mechanisms of power do we have? I would argue the answer to the second question is: next to none. We can support theaters that do it right, and call out those that don't, although most of us don't do the latter because we don't want to hurt our careers. But if Lynne Meadow doesn't want to support smaller theater, she's not going to support it, and there's fuck all we can do about it. I'm sorry to be that blunt about it, but it's true.

We are essentially dependent on getting the right people into the artistic and managing director slots and praying they don't get too compromised by their journey there. I'm sorry, but having spend six years on this blog essentially going by that strategy, I'm a little tired of pinning our hopes on the same fucking people who fucked the whole thing up in the first place. That's like expecting Harry Reid to do a good job of passing health care refo-- oh, wait. Fuck.

So while I agree in spirit with what Gus is saying, I think at the end of the day, the best we can hope for is to interact with those theaters that we like, whose ethos and work we respect, and either (a) not bother with the others or (b) actively work against them in the hopes that'll create some negative pressure that can move towards change. And something Outrageous Fortune can help us do is have a clearer-eyed, less idealistic point of view when we do interact with them.

I agree that theaters should have resident playwrights (real residencies) not their current system, I agree that theaters should promote and help the work of smaller theaters in town, and I agree that theaters should be more transparent in their ways of doing business both financially and artistically. But Outrageous Fortune didnt' come up with these ideas. And neither did Gus. Or I. They've been floating around for awhile now. I worry we're getting into an underpants gnome scenario where it goes:

Step One: Suggest a bunch of changes to how institutional theaters do business!

January 26, 2010

The intrepid Rocco talked about how easy a recent Jeopardy category of answers about "Family Drama" were. Really click here to read them. They are super-duper easy.

I thought we could come up with some better ones. I'd consider a $400 question (that's the easiest) to be like... "In this play, the title character deliberates about revenging his dead father, before killing basically everyone."

What would your other answers be? Make sure to put a dollar amount next to difficulty. Remember the category is "Family Drama".

(1) That health care spending is what is driving the deficit, rather than the more simple taxes-vs-outlays, and reforming health care is how you keep deficit spending down.

(2) That congressional discretionary spending is a big deal.

(3) That countercyclical spending is bad.

(4) That defense spending is sacrosant and untouchable.

It does not matter that Obama might be using a Right Wing frame to sneak in some additional funding for, say, jobs programs or whatever. It really doesn't. The point is, he's giving in on the fundamental argument. This means, amongst other things, that he now has to explain why exactly he was right and John McCain was wrong (or, in other words, why we should've elected him in the first place) even though he sounds like McCain now. Not only does he have to do that, but whatever magic formula he's come up with has to survive Congress intact.

Do you really think Kent Conrad is going to go, "sure, get rid of my farm subsidy, it's for the good of America?" No. What will happen is that, to cut a deal, some cuts will be left in, and then the things that get cut will be good programs that have little to no constituency (i.e. programs that help the poor). Meanwhile, Obama will remain distant from the details and publicly indicate that all he really cares about is that the overall number remain the same, rather than the details. That Obama will have already said in the 2010 SOTU that it is, in fact, the details that matter will be beside the point.

If you don't think this will happen, I will just show you both the Stimulus and Health Care Reform, both of which were made worse because Congress and Obama decided to stick with arbitrary numbers rather than amount of good that could be achieved.

This is a fucking disaster. I really, honestly am for the first time seriously regretting supporting, volunteering for and voting for Obama this week. I don't mean to be totally batshit crazy... there's a lot of good in the proposed banking bill, but between this and Health Care Reform, I'm getting really profoundly depressed.